Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Nicole was glad he knew what everything cost, because God knew she didn’t. “Two asses for the nuts and onions. “ Two more of the copper coins. “And two asses for the wine. Here, I’ll give you a dupondius, because I’m running out of asses.” This coin was bigger and brighter, yellowish instead of dirty-penny brown. It couldn’t have been gold, not if it was worth only two of the copper ones. Brass, maybe? Julia, watching him count up the bill, nodded at the amount. Nicole breathed a faint sigh of relief. She wasn’t being ripped off, then.

  “Here,” Ofanius Valens said with a wink, “I’ve got one lonely as left in my purse. If I give it to Julia, you will let her spend it on herself?”

  For an instant, Nicole didn’t understand why he’d asked her that. Julia was an adult, wasn’t she? Then realization smote. Legally speaking, Julia wasn’t an adult. Probably, she wasn’t even a person. Which had to mean that, technically, that as belonged to her owner. Before Julia could accept it, Nicole had to assent. “Yes,” she said, trying not to let anger at the system show. “Yes, of course.”

  Ofanius Valens nodded and smiled. He hadn’t intended her to refuse, nor given her much room to do it, either, by the signs. Nicole might have lousy taste in men, but she could read them perfectly well — too well, maybe, if you asked any one of a number of male lawyers whom she’d shown up in front of a judge. Men didn’t like to know how transparent they were.

  “Thank you very much, Mistress,” Julia said. If Ofanius Valens had expected Nicole to say yes, she probably had, too. Her gratitude had a hint of calculation in it, the calculation of the extremely disadvantaged. If she didn’t grovel enough, she might be thinking, then maybe next time she wouldn’t be allowed to keep the money she got. Children could think like that. So could employees. But there was an edge to it, a hint of ugliness. More than anyone else, a slave had to keep her mistress sweet, or who could say what might happen? If a slave wasn’t considered human, how could she have human rights?

  Women still got treated like that in the twentieth-century world — some even in the United States. People in the Third World lived like that. But not like this. Not quite.

  And what, Nicole wondered, did this slave really think of her mistress? What was going on, deep down, when she bent her head and said the words she judged it best to say? Nicole shivered. The likely answer wasn’t comfortable. In fact, it was scary.

  Ofanius Valens couldn’t know, any more than anyone else in this world and time, what Nicole was thinking — or even that Nicole was there; that it wasn’t Umma standing by him, waiting for him to get up and go on his way. He obliged with a cheerful air, oblivious to any undercurrents. “Tomorrow, then, Umma,” he said. “Then maybe I’ll order something different. Wouldn’t that be a jolt?”

  He went off whistling and laughing to himself at what was evidently a great joke. Well, Nicole thought a trifle wryly, there was a rarity: a man who knew how much a creature of habit he was.

  She shook her head and forgot about him — until tomorrow. Julia was still standing there, the coin clenched in her fist as if she feared her mistress would take it away after all. Nicole tried to reassure her with a smile. “What will you do with your as, Julia?” she asked. She hoped she didn’t sound too patronizing, or too much like an adult talking, uncomfortably, to a child.

  Julia didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the tone, or, if she did, it was a wrongness she was used to. She answered readily enough: “When things slow down this afternoon, Mistress, if you’ll let me, I’ll go over to the baths — it’s a ladies’ day today — and get clean. Is that all right? I’ll work hard all morning, I promise, so I won’t put you to any trouble. Please? “

  A grown woman shouldn’t have to beg like that. Nicole’s anger at Julia’s condition heated up again. She should not have to ask permission for every little thing, as if she were a small child.

  There was nothing Nicole could do, not right this instant, except give Julia what little she had to give, which was her permission. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s all right.”

  Julia smiled in pure happiness. Considering how rank she was, it had to be excruciating to have to be herself, and smell herself. Nicole wasn’t quite willing to admit that she was surprised. She’d let herself think nobody minded smelling bad — but if that was the case, why did the Romans have baths at all? Lord knew the ruins she’d seen here on her honeymoon were the biggest building in town.

  Now she was here, in the time when Roman baths were whole and in use, and she’d passed a milestone. She’d survived her first customer. That was worth a pause, and a gathering of forces. If one had come in for his breakfast, another couldn’t be far behind.

  Another customer did come, a few minutes after the first; and two more after that, and then a whole flood of them. Most were men, all hungry or thirsty or both — hungrier in the morning, thirsty as the day went on, hungry again toward evening. Without a clock, Nicole couldn’t know how many hours were passing. She was too busy most of the time to care.

  What with one thing and another, talking fast and ducking faster and calling on Julia to do the honors whenever she was caught up short, she survived the rest of the day. By the time the sun went down, she was wondering if she would go down, too: down for the count. In spite of Julia’s promise that things would slow down in the afternoon, Nicole was hopping every moment of the day.

  The first crisis came early, when someone bought two cups of wine, some bread, and a piece of smoked pork. Nicole hadn’t even noticed that the tavern boasted smoked pork; Julia used a forked pole to get it down from a hook in the ceiling. The hook was secured in a beam next to a hole through which smoke from the cookfires — or some of it, at least — escaped. As the smoke dribbled out the hole, it happened to preserve the meat. Nicole watched the middle-aged man happily devour the pork — ham, she supposed she should call it — and tried not to think about the carcinogens he must be ingesting with it.

  “That’ll be a sestertius altogether,” Julia said. She’d been giving out all the prices this morning, readily enough but with a glance at Nicole each time as if she expected Nicole to do it instead.

  After he’d fished in his belt pouch for what seemed like a very long time, the man confessed that he didn’t have enough small copper and brass coins to make up the value of a large — silver-dollar-sized — brass sestertius. His expression was sour. “I’m going to have to give you a denarius, curse it. Jupiter! I hate paying out silver for trifles, when I know cursed well I’ll get back nothing but base metal. Say whatever you like, but you know as well as I do, three bloody brass sesterces don’t come near being worth three-quarters of a silver denarius.”

  Four sesterces to a denarius. Nicole filed that away. And two asses made a dupondius. and two dupondii a sestertius.

  What was even worse, considering how unhappy her customer already was, she was still an as short of being able to give him the right change. He’d already complained about shelling out silver — real money — for fiat-currency pocket change. He’d be even less delighted to come up short of what he was supposed to be owed. It wasn’t just that he was getting toy money for his fifty-dollar bill — that toy money didn’t even equal the amount of his change.

  Julia saw the same thing at the same time. She looked around, seemed not to find what she was looking for, and turned back to Nicole. “Mistress, didn’t you bring the cash box downstairs with you this morning?”

  Nicole’s stomach clenched, as it had been doing at intervals since she woke in a strange bed. If it did much more of that, she’d end up with an ulcer. She shook her head in reply to Julia’s question.

  Julia made a noise that hadn’t changed between whenever this was and the 1990s: a small sigh that meant, I may be stuck working for you. but which one of us is the dummy?

  Nicole sighed herself and prayed for calm — never mind whom she prayed to; it didn’t matter. “Go and get the box,” she said. And added, probably not wisely: “Please.”

  For the firs
t time Julia didn’t go running to do her mistress’ bidding. “Oh, no, Mistress,” she said. “You can’t trick me that way. I don’t spy on you, no I don’t.” She folded her arms and set her lips thin and made herself a picture of triumphant virtue. It was so exaggerated, so downright stagey, that Nicole almost laughed and told her come off it — but she didn’t dare. This was worse than dealing with the secretarial pool, and much worse than knowing what to do with all the flocking servers in an upscale restaurant. She didn’t own the secretaries, and she certainly didn’t have the power to torture or kill the maitre d’ at Spago.

  “Well,” she said to cover the pause, which was stretching a little too long. “I certainly am glad that I can trust you.” If she could. But she wasn’t going to think about that. She nodded to the customer, who was starting to twitch with impatience, and almost fled up the stairs. If a slave had to get permission from her owner to receive even an as of her own, it made a horrid kind of sense that she wouldn’t be allowed to know where the cash was stashed. Unfortunately, neither did Nicole.

  It seemed logical that the money should be somewhere in the room where she’d awakened. But when she stood in the doorway, the little bare box of a place didn’t look as if it offered a hiding place for one sestertius, let alone a box full of them. She dropped to one knee to peer under the bed. Only the chamberpot there, as she’d seen earlier in the morning. Fear rose to choke her. If the box was lurking behind a loose board or in some kind of hidden compartment, she’d never find it — and her customer was waiting. Everyone was waiting for Nicole to give herself away, to prove she wasn’t Umma.

  She rummaged hastily through the drawers of the chest. The only box there was the one she’d found earlier, with its pots and jars of makeup. More out of desperation than anything else, she pulled the chest away from the wall — and nearly fell down in relief. There where it must have rested between chest and wall sat a wooden box. She picked it up, and grunted a little with surprise. It was heavy — and it rattled, a lovely, faintly sweet sound, the sound — she hoped — of coins sliding against one another.

  The dizziness of relief went briefly dark. She’d crowed too soon. This had to be the cash box, and that was wonderful — but the box was locked.

  The lock, broader and deeper than a regular padlock, was of shiny brass like a sestertius. So were the hasps holding it to the cash box. Those hasps looked stout. Nicole tugged hard at the lock. No give at all. No way she’d pull that lock off, or break it either, not without tools. She had to find the key.

  And if she wanted to keep people downstairs from suspecting that she wasn’t Umma, she’d have to find the key pretty damn quick. “Where the hell did she put it?” she muttered in English. The words felt strange on her tongue after so many hours of speaking Latin.

  She knew what was in the drawer with the makeup case. She’d emptied that one out most thoroughly. She shuffled through the others one at a time, with rapidly receding hope. Last of all and reluctantly, with the same sensation she’d had when she had to change a loaded diaper, she opened the drawer filled with stained rags. She tossed them on the floor, trying to touch them as little as possible. Close to the bottom, tangled in a knot of ill-washed scraps, something caught at her fingers. She pulled at the rags. The thing inside them slipped free. She’d been afraid it would be a brooch or a buckle or a bit of useless jewelry, but her luck had finally turned. A brass key gleamed in the shadow of the drawer. It was an odd-looking thing, the teeth cut perpendicular to the shaft instead of along its edge as on the keys she knew.

  When she thrust the key into the lock, it refused to turn. “Oh, come on!” she snapped at it. She twisted and jiggled. Nothing. Her fingers clenched till they began to ache.

  She hissed at them and at the intractable lock — God, don’t tell me that’s not the key, it’s got to be the key. Just as she was about to scream in frustration, the lock clicked and, grudgingly, ground open.

  She held her breath as she opened the box. If it proved to be full of buttons or bangles or something equally worthless, she really was going to scream.

  Her breath rushed out in a groan of relief. The box was filled nearly full: copper, bronze, even a little silver, coins of all sizes and states of wear, from dim and almost illegible asses to silver denarii like the one she had to make change for, and quickly too. It would be just her luck if the customer had cursed her and her fool of a slave, taken his change and his denarius too, and left in a snit.

  She hurled the rags all anyhow back into the drawer, slammed it shut, shoved the chest against the wall, and fairly fell downstairs. The man was still there, for a miracle. He’d fallen into conversation with another of the customers, she hoped not about how strangely Umma was acting today; he broke it off in his own good time, and took the three sesterces that she handed him, scowling at their brassy gleam. “Took you long enough,” he growled. “What did you have to do, fetch them from the mint?”

  “Was that lock giving you trouble again, Mistress?” Julia asked with an air of great solicitude. Turning to the customer, she went on, “You should hear all the things Mistress Umma calls that lock. Anybody would think she’d been in the legion herself, not just married to a veteran — may he rest in peace among the shades.”

  “Heh,” the man said: one syllable’s worth of laughter. He tossed the change into his purse and stalked off jingling.

  When he was gone, Nicole lifted her brows at Julia. “Am I really as bad as that about the lock?” she asked.

  Julia nodded, wide-eyed: another of her exaggerated stage effects. “Worse, Mistress, since you’re the one who wants to know,” she replied. Lucius and Aurelia mirrored her nod, big eyes and all. So were they in it together, or was Nicole — Umma — as paranoid as that?

  It paid to be paranoid in Los Angeles, but here? What could there be to be afraid of, that anyone from the twentieth century should worry about — except being discovered for what she was?

  It was midmorning, as best Nicole could determine, and the children still showed no sign of going off to school. Either this was a weekend (did the Romans have weekends?), or they didn’t go. Nicole could read and write, of course, and she’d seen that she was literate in Latin, too. Had Umma been as well? She hadn’t seen any books in the bedroom, but that didn’t prove anything. There hadn’t been any in her bedroom in West Hills, either, only the latest issue of Cosmo. Most of the books in the house, and all the bookcases, had gone with Frank. If Nicole ever had time to read at all, she read legal briefs that she’d brought home from the office.

  These children of Umma’s weren’t completely idle. They seemed to have their chores: cracking nuts, chopping scallions, sweeping out between waves of customers. They played, too, at headlong speed, till the inevitable happened: Aurelia screeched, Lucius whooped, they were on each other like cats and dogs. Nicole, as much amused as not — children, it seemed, were the same in every place and time — waded in and separated them. “There now,” she said, “you know that’s not nice. Lucius, be good to your little sister. Aurelia, don’t poke your brother, it’s rude. Now be good. Mother’s busy.”

  Nicole went back to grinding wheat into flour. It was hard work: her shoulder had already started to ache. Lucius and Aurelia watched her for a little while in silence, as if fascinated; then they were at it again, Aurelia poking, Lucius thumping with his fist, one screeching, the other jeering, till it escalated into honest violence.

  Nicole hissed between her teeth, left the mill for the second time and pulled them apart again, not quite so gently as before. Sore shoulder, toothache that never went away, and now children who refused to yield to reason, left her very little patience to spare. She held them apart in a firm grip, and glared into their flushed faces. “Didn’t the two of you listen to a word I said?”

  “Well, yes, Mother,” Lucius answered seriously, “but you didn’t hit us, so you couldn’t have really meant it.” Aurelia nodded as if she thought exactly the same preposterous thing.

  Nicol
e stared at both of them. She understood the words they said — as words. The thoughts behind them were as strange to her as the far side of the moon. Umma must beat them, she thought, for them to talk that way. Hadn’t Lucius flinched earlier when he’d thought she was going to wallop him?

  At the same time, they didn’t act the way abused children were supposed to act — the way she’d learned in law school they acted. There weren’t any marks on them, bruises or evident broken bones. They didn’t cringe when she lifted a hand, not unless they’d done something they thought deserved a spanking, or go mute when she spoke. There was nothing subdued about them. Lucius spoke of being hit calmly, as if it were something he was used to, and nothing exceptional at all.

  What kind of world was this, where children expected to be beaten, and weren’t obviously traumatized by it? That it wasn’t a world without violence, she’d certainly known, between Frank’s old movies and her own Sunday-school lessons: the Crucifixion, the persecution of Christians. But she’d never expected it to be as violent as it had turned out to be — or, what was worse, quite so easy about it. Her own century, after all, was the century of mass destruction, but life in America was sacred, and abuse, particularly abuse of children, was anathema. She’d thought better of this older, simpler age, and hoped for more than she was apparently going to get. Her jaw set in determination. These children were hers, it seemed, for the duration. Surely she had an obligation to teach them how civilized people should behave.

  She approached the problem obliquely: “If you don’t hit each other, I won’t have any reason to want to hit you. Why don’t we try that for a while and see how it works? Doesn’t it make sense?”